Tag Archives: Ideas for class

Back-to-School bright ideas!

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Another wonderful academic year is on the horizon, so here are some bright ideas to help you get organized and have fun with your new students:

1. GET AHEAD WITH YOUR PLANNING

Depending on your situation, you may know ahead of time what books and resources you’ll be using this year. Block off a few mornings before starting your year to get to know your course book. You can think about how to make tasks easier or harder, how to turn some sections into more communicative or game-based activities. You can spend time looking up resources or finding ideas on the Internet. So much happens in the first few weeks of class that spending time earlier getting this done is vital.

 2.  THINK ABOUT ASSESSMENT 

If you do know your course book ahead of time, think about which sections of the book you will use to assess your students, and how. Will you be doing a test at the start of the year to see what their level is like? Will you use mini tasks from the book every four weeks to assess progress in some areas? Does the course book come with assessment already built into its resources?

3. A WELCOMING SPACE

If you are permanently teaching in the same space every day, think about the decoration of your class. Can you put up colourful paper on the walls ready to show off students’ work in the future? Could you label in English some essential vocabulary, e.g. drawers, board, light switch. Can you put up posters that will help students with their English on the first day, such as useful phrases? If you are moving around to different rooms, perhaps you can keep some posters in your folder that can be transported from room to room and easily displayed.

5. DAY ONE AND WEEK ONE ICE BREAKERS 

It is important to get to know your students, and for students to get to know each other, to build up a good bond for the year. The first days are the time to test out the rules, expectations and rhythm of the class so that when you start to teach from the course book, the class will go a lot smoother as students will know what is expected of them. The first few days are also wonderful because everyone is excited to be back and school and is looking forward to what the academic year will bring. Here are a few ice breaker bright ideas to try out:

  • Summer break slideshow

Students can make a short presentation of 5 slides maximum showcasing what they did on their summer holidays using photos they took on their phones. Set a criteria, such as: best photo, best meal, best item you saw, best photo of you, the funniest photo and they talk through what they did on their holidays. Using presentation software such as PowerPoint, Prezi or Pitch can be useful. Challenge the listeners to come up with one question to ask the presenter after the presentation. A much faster version of this for day one could be to use the app Photo Roulette where students guess who took which photo.

Back to School bright ideas

Happy kids in sunglasses sitting at table on birthday party at summer garden and eating cupcakes

  • Get to know the teacher

Students love to find out facts about their teachers, so you can use this to help them practice their English and get to know you a little more. You could and ask a student to come and take an item. Then, students speculate with their partner or groups as to why this item is significant. For example, in the bag might be a small plastic toy dog, which shows you have a pet, an orange because it is your favourite fruit, and so on. To make this more movement based, designate one wall of your classroom as ‘true’, and the opposite as ‘false’ (use posters). Then, state some information about yourself and students run to the wall they think is the answer.

  • Student questionnaire

To assess reading and writing, you can ask students to fill in a question and answer paper on day one. For example, what is their favourite movie, music group, food etc. Then, for day two, you can prepare a ‘find someone who’ game based on the questionnaire answers.

  • Last person standing

Make sure students are sat at their desks in a rows and columns pattern.Tell one column (from front to back line) to stand up. Everyone else remains seated. Ask a question (it is best to prepare a long list of questions before class). Example questions: What’s this? How old are you? Only the students that are standing can answer the questions. If they know the answer they put their hand up. Ask one student with their hand up the answer (not necessarily in column order, try to make it random along the column). If they are correct they can sit down. Keep going until there is only one student stood up. Now the row of that student stands up and the game begins all over again. It’s a great way to bond and to review and test out what English your students know already.

  • Student parameters

Ask students to line up according to different criteria, for example ‘tallest to shortest’ ‘longest hair to shortest hair’ ‘shoe size’ ‘rainbow order t-shirts’. Time students – can they beat their time with each new criteria?

  • Question swap

Prepare some cards with some questions on, e.g. What are you looking forward to most this year? What would you do if you were suddenly a millionaire? Then, give each student in your class one question card face down.  I tell them not to look until each student has a card.  Once everyone is ready, students will move freely around the room to find another student in order to ask them the question on their card.  After they answer, that student will then ask the question on their card as well.  When both students have successfully asked and answered each of their questions, they trade cards and move around the room again to find someone new.  The goal is to ask, answer, and trade cards as many times as possible so they can meet all of their classmates.  It’s a perfect activity for teachers to join in as well.

Good luck and enjoy this new school year!

Hair-raisingly good Halloween English Reader activities

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Halloween reading activities

Halloween is just around the corner, and it is a wickedly wonderful way to encourage your older teen and adult students to broaden their vocabulary, consolidate their grammar and practice their reading skills by using classic horror or thriller English Readers in class. Pearson has a collection of more than 300 Pearson English Readers which are easy to use and contain lots of extra materials.

Some spook-tacular Halloween selections from the classic English Readers are:

  • The Phantom of the Opera
  • Dracula
  • The Hound of the Baskervilles
  • Dr Faustus
  • Hamlet
  • The Locked Room and other horror stories
  • Misery
  • Tales of Mystery and Imagination
  • The Canterville Ghost and other stories

If you want to use a Reader with your students in class, for Halloween or for any time of the year, here are some ideas to compliment the book.

Word Lists

Every Pearson Reader has a word list at the back of the book that gives a brief definition of the essential vocabulary used. Use these lists to design a ‘treasure hunt’ style game. For example:

Find:

  1. Three animals
  2. Two jobs
  3. Two places for dead people

After students have read the story, you can also play a quiz game where you read out a definition of a word and students buzz in and tell you the answer. Alternatively, another fun revision game is that you say a word and students must come up with a grammatically correct sentence using that word to win. It’s a fun way to practice new vocabulary.

Character Conversations

Once you have started to read the book with your students and the characters have been introduced, you can ask students to imagine that they are some of the characters in the book and to have a conversation with each other. For example, in the story Dracula, the Doctor comes to visit Lucy as she is under the spell of Dracula and is acting strange. A dialogue may look like this:

Student A: You are Dr Seward. Ask questions about how Lucy is feeling.

Student B: You are Lucy’s father, Arthur. Explain how Lucy is feeling.

Conversations can also take place between characters in the form of Instant Messaging, or mobile phone text messages. Students can collaborate on a shared document, such as Google docs, and read and respond in real time to their classmates’ messages. You can also do this via traditional pen and paper messages.

Another conversation practice can be character interviews. Student A is a very famous TV talk show host and invites one of the characters from the book on to their show for an interview. Student B is one of the characters. Students can prepare the questions together before acting out the dialogue.

Radio Plays

Ask your students to recreate the entire story, a chapter or part of the story in the form of a radio play. They not only have to be the characters but they also have to be foley artists. If you have permission from the students and/or parents, you can record them performing! Give students plenty of time to prepare their dialogues, scripts and find the props they need to make the sounds. If students are watching each other, provide some listening activity for the audience to do, such as:

Watch your classmates perform their radio play.

  • What did you like the best?
  • What sound effect was the most realistic?
  • Was their dialogue accurate from the book?
  • What was your favourite line?

Creative Writing

Try to find opportunities in the story to encourage different writing styles. For example, in Dracula, we could set these tasks:

  1. You are Dracula trying to sell your castle. Write a description of it.
  2. You work for the police. You want to tell people about the dangers of vampires. Write a report answering these questions: How will I know if a person is a vampire? What should I do if I see one?
  3. You are Jonathon and you have just spent the first night in Dracula’s castle. You send a text message to your fiancée Mina. Arrived safely. Dracula v. strange. J xx. Reply as Mina and then continue the conversation between them both.
  4. The book publisher wants you to write a 100-word description for the back of the book that will encourage people in the 21st Century to read it – careful, do not reveal the ending of the story!

Personalisation

Many of these Readers are suitable for Halloween because they play on our fears. Some are supernatural, such as vampires or werewolves, but others are more real, such as locked rooms or insects. Personalising questions either before students read the text or after is a great way to either build anticipation or check understanding of the story, and it helps students to use quite specific vocabulary. For example, in the short story The Ash Tree, we can ask our students before they read:

Which of these situations would frighten you most?

A You are walking alone in an open field at night. You see a black shape with two very bright eyes.

B You are driving along a road on a stormy night. Tall trees on each side of the road are moving wildly.

Or in The Barrel of Amontillado before students read:

This story involves a slow death and a barrel of expensive wine. Discuss how the person might die.

and in The Locked Room after the students have read it, we can discuss and speculate what we might do in the same situation:

Imagine you have just been into the locked room for the first time. You saw the clothes move and you heard the steps behind the door. What will you do now? Talk to another student.

Debates

Debate

Debates are great because not only do students practice speaking but they also have to give logical reasons as to why they are defending a particular idea, which is a very useful skill to have. We can choose to have a two-sided debate, such as after reading The Phantom of the Opera, the debate could be:

The mayor of Paris and the Captain of Police wants to tear down the Opera House after the recent scandals, but the locals want to protect the historical and beautiful building.

The class then splits 50/50 and they prepare their ideas and arguments before debating. Alternatively, the debate can be character based with multiple opinions. For example, after reading Faust, the debate could be:

In groups of five, imagine and act out this scene. The characters are:

  • The Pope
  • The army officer
  • The King of Germany
  • The Duke of Vanholt
  • Robin

A world organization thinks that Faustus should receive its top international prize for his services to science. Do you agree? Make short speeches and then have a discussion.

Halloween is the perfect time in the academic year to introduce readers to your class if you have not done so already. The Pearson Readers form part of the ‘Connected English Learning Program’ as it is part of the vast resources available to help your students to learn English through topics they love.

Once upon a time: 10 story activities for the primary classroom

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Children love stories! Stories appeal to their vivid sense of imagination and appetite for fantasy. They help children understand and accept their own feelings and are a vehicle to teach values and about other cultures. And from a language perspective, they are a rich source of vocabulary and structures in context and lend themselves to both serious and enjoyable learning for our pupils.

In this blog post we will consider 10 classroom-ready activities to use alongside stories in the classroom. These are divided into three sections: before reading, while reading and post-reading

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Ask a Stupid Question Day

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Interrobang

When you saw the title of this post you probably thought that this is just the latest example of a world gone crazy with yet another apparently random silly holiday.  Better think again.

Ask a Stupid Question day, far from being a pointless unofficial holiday, was created in the 1980’s by a group of teachers with a very specific purpose in mind: encouraging their students to participate more in class by asking questions. They knew that most of them had lots of questions but believed they kept many to themselves for fear of being laughed at.

It takes place on the 28th of September, but it’s commonly celebrated on the last day of class this month. Since its creation, this has been an annual tradition in American schools, and has recently become popular in Britain and India.

So how might we English teachers take advantage of this date at the beginning of the year to foster a more participative classroom which focuses on the needs of our learners? Continue reading →

5 ways for students to watch video more effectively at home

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Video in ESL classroom

One of the most common pieces of advice a teacher will give to a student wanting to improve their listening (and quite possibly their vocabulary) is to “watch films in English.”  It seems like a sensible enough suggestion on the surface.  After all, it couldn’t do any harm could it?  But perhaps the question is: Does simply watching films in English translate into any real improvement in listening and vocabulary, or does it perhaps require a bit more effort than that?

My own experience of learning Spanish tells me that watching films or television is indeed extremely helpful, but I also remember that most of the time I spent in front of the TV in my first months in Spain was spent in the company of the family I lived with.  I could easily ask them questions to check the meaning of words or concepts and instantly check their reactions to what was happening on the screen to see if I was following the thread.  In short, I had something very similar to teachers on hand.

So, what tips can we give our students to get the most out of their viewing?  How can they make time often spent alone in front of the TV less passive, and actively take control of their learning on their own?  Here are a few tips:

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3 ways to bring assessment for learning into your classroom

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rocketWe all want our students to become more independent and responsible for their learning, but this won’t happen without the right support. Enter assessment for learning! As opposed to assessment of learning (think end of term exams, categorisation of students, awarding a number), assessment for learning sees learning as a journey: what does my student know, where are they going, what do they need to get there? Let’s look at three simple ways that good teachers employ assessment for learning.  

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Halloween: great teaching ideas for teens

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Halloween: great teaching ideas for teensGhosts, witches, black cats, haunted houses… Despite the creepy flavour of these terms, I’ve always liked Halloween: 31st of October, the spookiest day of the year, as it is said to be. As teachers, many of us celebrate this autumn festivity by decorating our classrooms with spider-webs, skeletons, bats, etc., and by asking our students to dress up as ghosts, witches or werewolves.

We have already talked about some Halloween activities that your primary students will love, but there is also a wealth of activities out there for teenagers. Just type “Halloween activities for teens” in your internet browser and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Is this just another blog post with a compilation of links? No, it isn’t. Here you will find practical teaching ideas, which require little preparation time. Continue reading →

5 ways you can harness your students’ holiday experiences in class

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Ideas for English class for your Secondary students

It’s always a good time for your students to tell you about their summer holidays.

Many of us will probably be covering the Past Simple at some stage in the first term before Christmas, so why not combine this with something your students really want to talk about. You’ll always get a response from teenagers when they have the chance to express their own personal experiences and feelings and what better opportunity than to talk about their own holidays. Of course a discussion about one’s summer holiday can be over in a flash, so it is important to harness this personal experience and turn it into a learning opportunity by creating a product which can be shared with the rest of the class.

Here are 5 ways you can harness your students’ holiday experiences in class: Continue reading →

Teaching skills for working with teens

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Teaching skills for working with teens - Image by Mansour BethoneyTeaching English to teenagers can be frustrating and fulfilling in equal measure. They can be full of energy and ideas that add a real buzz to the class, but they can also be sullen, self-conscious, reluctant to work together and difficult to engage. However, if you approach lessons with teenagers with the right ideas, materials and tricks of the trade, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be a great success.

Here’s our list of indispensable teaching skills for working with teens:

***Do group project work***

Group projects come in all shapes and sizes and work well with teenagers. They increase motivation, promote learner autonomy, have clear, achievable objectives, involve all four language skills, and can be managed in a way that lets everyone in the group take on a role that’s best suited to them. They also make a welcome break from routine and can be run over several classes, with a section of each lesson allocated to them. You’ll find plenty of examples of project work here and here. Continue reading →